Forward Guidance Newsletter Segment

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Before writing about crypto, I spent a couple of years covering the traditional asset management industry (mutual funds, ETFs, etc).

Janus Henderson was one of the companies on my beat. So when I saw the investment firm’s name in my crypto-centric inbox this morning, I was once more reminded of the ongoing TradFi-DeFi intersection.

The announcement dealt with the launch of a credit infrastructure DeFi protocol called Grove, which allocated $1 billion from the Sky ecosystem to the newly tokenized Janus Henderson Anemoy AAA CLO Strategy (JAAA).

Janus Henderson partnered with Anemoy and Centrifuge to launch its first tokenized fund—offering access to short-term US Treasury bills—last September.

Nick Cherney, Janus Henderson’s innovation head, noted at the time that “bringing robust institutional collateral pools into decentralized autonomous organizations and stablecoin ecosystems” is a big piece of the TradFi-DeFi bridge.

Now, Janus Henderson has a tokenized version of the CLO (Collateralized Loan Obligation) ETF it launched in 2020. The fund, which seeks income via collateralized loan obligations of various maturities, has more than $20 billion assets under management.

“CLOs are just one of the many assets ripe for movement into DeFi due to their attractive yield profile and structure,” Grove Labs co-founder Sam Paderewski argued.